


Puppet

by StarStrom21



Category: Gravity Falls, Monster Falls AU - Fandom, Monsterfalls
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 09:29:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3645291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarStrom21/pseuds/StarStrom21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dipper gets mad a Bill and tells him to stop calling him puppet, not knowing what he was really saying to the demon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Puppet

**Author's Note:**

> This kinda popped into my head when I read a fan fiction and Bill called Dipper puppet but in the context it almost sounded like a term of affection. Knowing my weakness of bad guys getting a soft spot for the child protagonist I had to write something like that and this was what came out.  
> Also don’t ask me how a lake monster knows about demon culture because I don’t know. I just needed someone to tell Dipper about it and my human Gobblewonker was the only one I could think of.

Dipper couldn’t move, no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get his deer half to listen to him and his body remained locked into place. Only a small amount of grass slightly taller than his head he was now lying down from hid him from view and to top it all off he’d regressed to the body of a three year old. The whole situation would be very annoying if he wasn’t terrified out of his mind. It was just his luck to come across a humanized wendigo that didn’t yet realize that its desire for living hearts was gone. He could only hope that his hiding place was enough to keep the now human wendigo to not find him and leave.  
Unfortunately, his hopes seemed to be dashed when he heard something coming closer. Dipper closed his eyes trying not to think how long it would take for blunt human nails and teeth to rip down to his heart. He held his breath when the grass around him was pushed away and he braced for pain, but it never came. Instead, he heard something that was almost worse.  
“Hey there, Pine Tree.”  
Dipper opened his eyes and frowned up at the one-eyed triangle smiling down at him. Why did it always have to be Bill who found him like this? Almost anyone else would have been better than the humanized dream demon. No scratch the almost, really anyone would have been better than the demon.  
“What do you want, Bill?” Dipper scowled.  
“What, I can’t help out a baby cervitor?” Bill chuckled, placing a hand on the boy’s head.  
Finally able to unfreeze at least the more human part of his body Dipper jerked away from the contact, still glaring at the demon.  
“Still, looks like you’re going to be stuck here a little bit longer here without some help, puppet,” Bill went on.  
Dipper grit his teeth, he hated it enough when Bill called him Pine Tree but puppet was like saying he owned him which just made him feel sick. However, he didn’t have much time to think on that too much as he felt his body being lifted into the air. He jolted and looked to see that Bill was now holding him, with one arm under his deer half and other on his human half.  
“Hey what are you doing?” Dipper protested as he uselessly flailed in the demons hold.  
“What does it look like, Pine Tree?” Bill asked, “I’m taking you home before that idiot wendigo comes back.”  
Dipper sighed in defeat knowing there was no way to argue, he really did need help getting back to the shack. Still he was pretty annoyed with Bill and needed to say something.  
“Stop calling me that,” he demanded, voicing his dislike to the nickname.  
Bill looked down at the cervitor who was now starting to grow back to his normal age. “What, Pine Tree? Sorry no can do. We demons kinda got rules that were locked to. I can’t stop calling you that any more than I can stop calling your sister Shooting Star. Just something I’m bond too, and I’m sure you wouldn’t really want to experience the consequences if I called you by your given names,” Bill explained.  
The way Bill said consequences made Dipper realize that he probably didn’t want to know what those where so decided that it was best to leave it alone. “Fine, but then can you stop calling me puppet. I hate that more than Pine Tree,” he told the demon.  
That made Bill stop and his constantly mocking smile waver, before he shook his head and the smile was back, though it seemed almost forced. “Yeah whatever, Pine Tree all you had to do was ask,” Bill said but didn’t look at Dipper again.  
Once they were back at the shack Bill set Dipper down and walked inside without even giving a teasing smirk. Dipper frowned at the demons behavior before going inside himself.  
A while later Dipper was up in his room with Bill pushed to the back of his mind. When he heard someone coming up the stairs he looked up from his book. It couldn’t have been Mable since she couldn’t get up the stairs on her own and the steps were too light to be Stan’s. Both Soos and Wendy’s shifts were over so he couldn’t think of who it would be.  
His answer came when all he saw was a curtain of black hair instead of a face. An olive skinned hand came up and parted the hair to show one eye and half a smile, the most Dipper had ever seen of the woman’s face, though it was much more than most got to see.  
“Hey Gwen, what are you doing here? Thought you didn’t like being this far from the lake,” Dipper said as he greeted the humanized lake monster.  
Gwen shrugged. “I had Rodger go play ball with his dad before we had another robot version of me terrorizing the lake side. I was getting kind of lonely so I came over to see if your sister needed to stretch her fins a bit,” she explained.  
“Oh, well Mabel’s in the bath tub downstairs. What did you come up here for?” Dipper asked.  
“I came up to ask if you know what was going on with Bill? Mabel said there was something going on with him ever since he came home and asked me to see if you knew anything,” Gwen told him.  
Dipper frowned at hearing that. He would be the first to say that he disliked Bill and was annoyed by him but there was a nagging guilt now that he knew that he’d done something to upset him this badly.  
Gwen seemed to pick up on his mood and her smile fell. “Dipper? What happened with Bill?” she asked.  
Dipper let out a sigh and looked away from Gwen. “It started after he found me in the woods after I’d gotten scared by a man that didn’t understand he wasn’t a wendigo anymore. I was kinda still frozen so he picked me up and carried me back to the shack. I was already annoyed with the situation and Bill was only making it worse so I told him to stop calling me a puppet and he just got all quiet after that. I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” he explained.  
The eye that Dipper could see went wide on Gwen’s face when she heard what had happened. Dipper frowned in confusion at this.  
“What?” he asked.  
“Dipper, you know how each monster in Gravity Falls has their own culture and customs right?” Gwen started.  
Dipper nodded. Yes he’d even seen that with the gnomes and manotaurs.  
“It’s the same with demons,” Gwen continued.  
“You mean like how he can only call us by those nicknames he gives us?” Dipper asked.  
Gwen nodded. “Yeah, something like that, though this isn’t exactly a rule he has to follow it’s more of a cultural difference. You see demons aren’t really known for their caring about people and they kind of embrace that view of themselves. That however means that when they do care for someone, especially a mortal they have a not very direct way of showing it. Puppet was what they call the people they possess, but they also tended to possess their favorite humans, ones they cared for. During possession the soul of the person that got possessed would be placed out of harm’s way as the demon did what evil it intended to do and that’s pretty much how demons keep people they like safe. So when a demon calls someone their puppet it’s kind of their way of saying they want to protect that person,” Gwen informed.  
Dipper’s eyes went wide at the realization of what that meant and what he’d actually done according to how Bill saw it. “So when I told him I didn’t want him to call me puppet anymore I was basically rejecting his care for me?” he concluded.  
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” Gwen said.   
Dipper looked down at the book in his hands before throwing it to the side and moving to get out of his bed. “I need to talk to Bill,” he said and Gwen nodded.   
Dipper went downstairs and started looking for Bill. It wasn’t long till he found him in the living room sitting on the couch and looking at the floor. Dipper’s heart clenched a bit at the sight. His words must have really hurt Bill.  
Slowly he came into the room, his hooves clacking against the wood floor. “Bill?” he asked hesitantly.  
The demon looked up and dipper noticed a black liquid running down from his eye. At first Dipper thought that Bill must have just recovered from another forced transformation, but by the way he quickly tried to brush it away he found that it must have been Bill’s equivalent to crying. Realizing this only made Dipper feel worse, he’d really messed up.  
Eventually Bill broke the awkward silence that had settled around them, “What do you want, pu… uh Pine Tree?”  
Dipper looked away trying to push back the lump of guilt that was stuck in his throat. “I wanted to say I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” he told him, “I didn’t know what it meant when you called me puppet. I thought it was just another annoying nickname you gave me.”  
Bill didn’t say anything but he kept his eye locked on Dipper so he decided it was alright to get closer.  
“Gwen told me what it means for a demon to call someone that,” Dipper explained.   
Bill seemed to tense up at that but he still didn’t say anything.  
Dipper hung his head, not realizing he’d moved a bit closer to the demon. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say I didn’t want you to care about me or anything like that. I was just angry about everything and I felt like I needed to argue about something so that’s what came into my head,” Dipper continued. He then felt tears start to well up in his eyes but he blinked them away. He was starting to really rethink his relationship with the demon and found they were much closer then he’d thought. Now he might have ruined it because he was stupid and didn’t pay attention.  
“Pine Tree,” Bill finally said and the cervitor looked up. The next thing he knew he was being picked up and placed in Bill’s lap.  
Dipper let out a surprised bleat but soon found that he didn’t really mind the position he was in. He still looked up at Bill with confusion though.  
“It’s ok kid, you didn’t know. Can’t blame you for that,” Bill started, “I shouldn’t have expected you too either. It’s just in my nature to hide what I feel and be cryptic with what I mean.”  
Dipper felt Bill’s hand run along his dear half as if he were petting him, but he didn’t bring it up. It actually felt rather nice, especially now that he knew it was because Bill cared about him and it wasn’t to mock his new body.   
“So are things ok now?” he asked.  
Bill smiled and looked down at the boy in his lap. “Yeah, things are ok now, puppet.”


End file.
